FED - Family Court merger - Matter and Form updates
As per the Courts' recent announcements, the amalgamated Family Court of Australia and Federal Circuit Court of Australia will commence on 1 September 2021. While we await publication of the Rules, we can advise as follows in relation to matter types and forms in the interim:
MATTER TYPES:
The following updates have been made in Family Law matter types and will be available from 1 September 2021:
New Card table- Child Court Expert card will replace Family Consultant card
New Salutations - addition of Senior Judicial Registrar, Judicial Registrar and Deputy Registrar to the salutations list
Critical Dates - the following matter types have also been updated with additional critical dates to reflect the new case management pathway of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia:
Property & Children, Children and ICL matter types:
- Genuine Steps Certificate
- First Court Event
- Child Impact Report
- Compliance and Readiness Hearing
- Trial Management Hearing
Property/Financial Settlement matter types:
- Genuine Steps Certificate
- First Court Event
- Compliance and Readiness Hearing
- Trial Management Hearing
HOW DO I GET THE UPDATES IN MY EXISTING MATTERS?
To receive the updates for existing matters, or to amend your Recurring Matter template, you should:
- refresh your matter by changing the matter type and changing it back again (be assured all of your data will remain); and
- if required, update your original precedents if any of them contain the Family Consultant table - note: there is no need to manually change this field as you can do this with the Replace References feature in LEAP.
Once the Rules have been published, we will be in a position to make any further changes to matter types that may be required. If you would like to provide feedback in this regard, please do so here.
FORMS:
As the Court have been unable to provide advanced copies of the new forms, the LEAP Forms will be updated and released during the 90 day grace period (where the Courts have advised that they will continue to accept existing versions of the forms until the end of the transition period).
Basic form changes will be updated and released as and when the new forms are received from the Courts. However, as the majority of our forms (e.g. Financial Statement and Application for Consent Orders) contain complex developer coding, these forms will require greater time for the updates to be made.
REMOVAL OF OLD FORM VERSIONS:
Recently, we advised that we would retire the legacy versions of these forms on 31 August 2021. Therefore the following old form versions will be removed after 31 August 2021:
- Financial statement (OLD) LL-FED-FLC-520 (Family Court of Australia)
- Financial statement (OLD) LL-FED-FLC-620 (Federal Circuit Court of Australia)
- Application for consent orders (OLD) LL-FED-FAM-024
Further updates will be published on the LEAP Forms Blog and more details regarding the Family Court merger are also available on the By Lawyers Obiter site.
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